Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  The Wyatts came over. Ralph brought him a knife with a bone handle. Rebecca delivered up a pocket watch that had once belonged to Ralph’s cousin Vernon Harvey. Vernon was born in Snowflake, Arizona, and died in France twenty-two years later. During something called the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Vernon’s legs were blown clean off. Whoever thought such a thing would be appreciated took the time and trouble to empty Vernon’s pockets and get those personal effects back to his family. Vernon’s sister couldn’t bear to have anything in the house, and thus the effects were scattered far and wide. How the dead soldier’s watch ended up in the possession of Rebecca Wyatt, even Rebecca was uncertain, but she believed that Carson would value it, and thus she wrapped it in tissue and presented it to him on the occasion of his eighteenth. Carson was polite, but he did not really get the point of someone else’s dumb old pocket watch. Evan, however, was fascinated, and wanted to know everything there was to know about Vernon Harvey and the legs he’d left behind in the Argonne Forest. Rebecca embellished the story for him, detailing acts of selfless heroism performed by Corporal Vernon Harvey, the lives saved, the children rescued from burning French farmhouses, the German marksman he tracked for three days and nights, sleepless, without food or water, until finally cornering him and killing him stone dead with a single bullet to the heart.

  Evan Riggs was fourteen years old, and he could feel the history in that watch. He could also feel something in his lower gut that told him he would think of Rebecca Wyatt last thing before he slept and first thing when he woke.

  After the party was over, Grace asked Evan what he thought of Rebecca. Evan was almost asleep, exhausted from the day’s celebrations.

  “She makes my mind quiet and my heart loud,” he said, which unsettled Grace Riggs, not simply because it was a remarkably profound thing for a boy of Evan’s age to say, but because she knew it was true.

  She also noticed that the pocket watch that had survived the First World War now seemed to belong to Evan rather than Carson.

  Rebecca Wyatt came over to the Riggses’ place three days later. She stood there on the veranda in the sunlight and she was more beautiful than she’d ever been.

  Being beautiful meant a different life, a life those without beauty would never understand. Beauty opened doors, alleviated pressures, vanished cares, paid for dinner. Beauty made a path less rugged and challenging. Those fortunate enough to be beautiful would also never understand how it was to be plain and unimportant and forgettable. Those who said beauty was a curse were always beautiful, and they lived in a very different world.

  And then there was another kind of beauty, and that was beauty unaware. Even more mysterious and enchanting, even more dangerous perhaps, were those who did not know it. Rebecca Wyatt was one of those, and Grace Riggs knew that through no real intent of her own, Rebecca would break more hearts than ever she would heal.

  On Wednesday, January nineteenth, the soon-to-be-sixteen heartbreaker set wheels in motion that would resolutely turn unseen for years to come. Unbeknownst to her, she would establish lines of battle between Evan and Carson sufficient to challenge the ferocity of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, and it started—as such things so often did—with a kiss.

  “Rebecca,” Grace said, opening the screen. It was midafternoon, school was done, and this was the third day in the same week that the girl had shown up on the doorstep. Once had been by invitation, but the other two had not.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Riggs,” Rebecca said politely. “I wondered if Carson and Evan would be interested in coming for a walk.”

  “Carson’s away with his daddy,” Grace explained. “He’s a working man now. Evan is here, but I believe he has homework.”

  “Maybe I could help him?” Rebecca asked.

  “Maybe you could,” Grace said. “I know he struggles a little with math.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Come on in, my dear. Let’s see what he’s up to.”

  Evan was indeed struggling some with math.

  “I mean, what the hell would anyone be doing with sixty cantaloupes, each weighing an average of five pounds, anyway?” he wanted to know, and Rebecca said, “That’s just math, Evan. It’s like life. You don’t have to understand why. You just have to figure it out.”

  They figured it out together, and when the cantaloupe issue was resolved, Evan told his ma that he and Rebecca were going to take a walk out toward the Pecos River.

  “Back by supper,” Grace said. “You want me to telephone your father and ask if you can eat with us, Rebecca?”

  “That’s really appreciated, Mrs. Riggs, but I have to have supper with my pa. He says that eating alone is like drinking alone … You wind up talking to yourself out of boredom, and it’s all downhill from there.”

  “Your father has a wry sense of humor, indeed.”

  Grace stood drying her hands on the veranda as Rebecca Wyatt took off with her youngest son. They were fluid and compatible, those two. There was no awkwardness or irregularity in their body language, as if each knew that there was no other place to be. Even at fourteen, Evan had a sense of grace about him. Nothing less than masculine, but somehow fluently mannered. Together, Rebecca and Carson were different. There was a stiffness about Carson, his actions possessive of some maladroit clumsiness. He was not accident prone, not at all, but his and Rebecca’s physicality were certainly not complementary.

  Out of earshot, Evan asked more about Vernon Harvey.

  “Why do you want to know about him so much?” Rebecca asked.

  “It’s interesting.”

  “I got something more interesting,” Rebecca said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Got a .22 rifle and a rattler’s nest.”

  “You have not.”

  “Have too.”

  “No way, Rebecca.”

  “Swear it’s true. You ever fired a rifle?”

  “Sure I have. Pistol, too. With my pa, of course.”

  “Well, I took the rifle out of the barn, got some shells, hid it down by this place I know. You wanna shoot it?”

  “Do I ever! Yeah, sure. Let’s go kill some snakes.”

  They got the gun, fired it a few times at rocks and trees, Evan near flat on his ass one time because he didn’t sit it in his shoulder correctly. Rebecca was a better shot than he, but—unlike Carson, who would have been aggrieved by such a detail—Evan merely saw it as an opportunity to learn something.

  The snakes’ nest was found, but the snakes didn’t want to come out and get their heads shot off. Rebecca said they’d been too noisy coming over the rocks, scared the things deep inside, which baffled Evan because he didn’t think snakes had ears.

  Giving the whole thing up as a foolhardy notion, they walked the rifle to the Wyatt farm, put it right back where it was supposed to be, and went inside for lemonade.

  “Where’s your pa at?” Evan asked.

  “Somewheres,” she said, which seemed an adequate answer, because Evan inquired no further.

  They sat at the kitchen table, silent for a time, and then Rebecca asked if Evan had ever kissed a girl.

  Evan laughed. He didn’t seem embarrassed. He just wondered why she asked, and said so.

  “Just curious,” Rebecca said.

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “You want to?”

  “Sure. Why … ? Who do you want me to kiss?”

  Rebecca laughed. “You are a goof sometimes, Evan Riggs. I want you to kiss me.”

  Evan looked serious for a moment. “Now, why on earth would you want me to do that?”

  “For the hell of it. To see what it’s like. Do you have to have a reason for everything?”

  “I guess not,” Evan said. “So, when shall we do this?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe next Tuesday. I’ll have to check my social calendar.”

  “Well, perhaps I have other girls to kiss next Tuesday, so you should let me know.”

  “Are there other girls you wanna kiss more th
an me, Evan Riggs?”

  “I don’t even really wanna kiss you, Rebecca Wyatt,” Evan replied, which was a lie, and he had a tough time keeping a straight face.

  “So, are you gonna kiss me or what?”

  “Should we stand up?” he asked.

  “I guess we should,” Rebecca said. “My lips aren’t big enough to reach yours from here.”

  They stood up. They looked at each other and started laughing. It wasn’t awkward. It was just kind of dumb, and they both knew it.

  Rebecca reached out and took Evan’s hand. He took a step or two closer until their noses were no more than four or five inches apart. He closed his eyes and puckered.

  “You look like a fish,” she said.

  Evan frowned. “You want me to kiss you or what?”

  “I’m sorry … This is kinda stupid.”

  “Stoopid is as stoopid does,” Evan said. “If you think this is that stoopid, why’d you ask me to do it?”

  She leaned forward suddenly and kissed him. Later he would think of it, and though there was no real way to describe the sensation he experienced in that moment, he did see how such a thing might become addictive, how it might prompt people to write songs and poems and suchlike. It was an external action that provoked an internal reaction, and he liked it so much, he kissed her back.

  This time she parted her lips a fraction, and when her tongue flickered against his, it was as if he’d been given an electric shock by a butterfly. Most of the sensation he felt, however, was in his stomach.

  “How was it?” Rebecca asked him.

  “Real nice,” Evan said.

  She smiled and touched his face. “I liked it, too,” she said.

  They didn’t kiss again, at least not that day, and when Evan headed home, it was already close enough to suppertime for him to go at a run.

  When he arrived, his mother, father, and brother were already washed up and hungry.

  “Where have you been?” Carson asked.

  “Over at the Wyatt place,” Evan said, and he smiled a smile that Grace Riggs had not seen before.

  She saw something in him, something new, something quite real, that told her that her younger one was closer to a man than her older one might ever be.

  TEN

  Knox Honeycutt was elbows and knees and little else. The man was a head taller than six feet, and the cuffs of his pants and the sleeves of his shirt were too short by a good deal.

  He was friendly enough, though. Said that Sheriff Riggs had just called him, explained someone was coming over who needed a room for the night.

  “And you’d be that someone, I guess?”

  “Yes, sir. I would be.”

  “We own the boardinghouse at the end of the street,” Honeycutt said. “You go on down there. Can’t miss it—white, three-story, flower boxes off the veranda railing. My wife’s name is Alice. Tell her I sent you down. You’ll be okay for dinner, and she’ll make you up a room for the night.”

  “It’s really very kind of you on such short notice.”

  “Oh, think nothing of it, son. Any friend of Carson Riggs an’ all that.”

  Leaving the mercantile, Henry Quinn was again struck with a sense of something unspecific. He was not a friend of Carson Riggs. Why had Honeycutt said that, if not because Riggs had told him such a thing? And why would Riggs tell Honeycutt that they were friends? Because of Henry’s friendship with Evan? Unlikely, if only because there appeared to be no love lost between the brothers. Maybe it was nothing more nor less than Southern hospitality, famous everywhere but the South, for the South was very selective about its friendships and allegiances.

  Nevertheless, it was a choice between the Honeycutt boardinghouse and the pickup, and no matter the means by which it was obtained, a bed was better than a bedroll and blanket in the back of a Studebaker.

  Henry found the place without difficulty. Alice Honeycutt herself came to the door when he knocked. She was a head shorter than Henry. She and her husband must have appeared an odd pair those times they were seen together.

  “Knox send you down?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Henry replied. “Said it would be okay if I stayed over for the night.”

  “No problem at all, young man,” Mrs. Honeycutt said. “And if you’re hungry, I can make you up a plate. We sort of finished dinner a little while ago, but there’s more than enough left.”

  “That would be appreciated,” Henry said.

  “You have a bag or some such?”

  “In the pickup,” Henry said.

  “Well, let’s get you fed. I’ll get a bed made up, and then you can fetch your things.”

  Henry was shown through to the dining room. There were a half dozen smaller tables, some of them set for two, some for four, and in front of the street-facing window there was a longer table with eight chairs around it.

  “Pot roast,” Alice Honeycutt told him. “That’s gonna have to do you, because that’s all we got.”

  “That would be just fine, thank you, ma’am.”

  She left him sitting there, wondering why there had been no talk of money.

  Ten minutes, no more nor less, and a young woman came through with a plate. Henry guessed she was in her early twenties. Dressed in jeans, suede moccasins, a cheesecloth blouse, her hair a wild tangle of tight curls corralled with a leather thong, she seemed more suited to a rock festival than a small-town boardinghouse. She was pretty, no doubt about it, and Henry sensed his own awkwardness after three years of nothing but the company of men.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey you,” she replied.

  “Are you Mr. and Mrs. Honeycutt’s daughter?”

  The girl sort of half laughed. “I look like the kind of daughter they’d have?”

  “Lot of people don’t look like their folks,” Henry ventured.

  “Well, I ain’t, no.”

  “You work here?” he asked pointlessly.

  “Nope. I just do this for the hell of it.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You with the cops, or what?”

  Henry laughed. “No.”

  “What’s with the third degree?”

  “Just being polite. Making conversation, you know?”

  “My name is Evie Chandler,” she said.

  “I’m Henry Quinn.”

  “Good for you,” she replied, and turned to walk away.

  “Thank you for the dinner,” Henry said.

  “Think nothing of it,” Evie said over her shoulder, and left the room.

  While he ate, Henry wondered if Evie Chandler was as abrupt and unfriendly to everyone, or if he’d been selected for some kind of special treatment. Regardless, he couldn’t ignore the effect she’d had on him. He guessed any pretty girl would have done the same.

  Henry ate. The pot roast was good. He was thirsty, but there didn’t seem to be anything to drink.

  His dinner finished, he went back out to the front porch of the house, heard nothing, saw no one, and figured he should get his things from the pickup.

  Out on the veranda, he found Evie smoking a cigarette.

  “So what’s your story, mister?” she asked. Her attitude was still brusque and surly.

  In the semidarkness, sitting there on the railing, now sporting a denim jacket over her blouse and cowboy boots in place of moccasins, she was West Texas through and through. Her hair, now let down, was a cascading mass of featherweight chestnut curls. She really was a very pretty girl, no doubt about it, but the snarly attitude wasn’t doing her any favors.

  “Maybe I don’t have a story,” Henry said.

  “Everyone has a story.”

  “I’m here to find someone.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Too late. I just said it.”

  Evie smiled. “You think you can win against me?”

  “Is there a contest here?”

  “Life is a contest.”

  “Sure it is, but not between you and me, lady.” Hen
ry started down the steps toward the pickup.

  “That your guitar in the back of that pickup?”

  “How do you know I have a guitar in the back of my pickup?”

  “I went and looked. Jeez, you ain’t so bright, are you?”

  Henry laughed. “I am bright enough, I guess. And, yes, it is my guitar.”

  “You play?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then what you got it for?”

  “I use it to beat aggressive, unpleasant girls to death. Weighs ten pounds or more. Hefts like an ax.”

  Evie smiled. “You wanna go get a beer?”

  “What … all of a sudden we’re friends?”

  “Depends how you behave.”

  “I’ll take my stuff in, lock the truck, then we’ll go.”

  “Do whatever. Your truck’ll be safe here. No one’s gonna steal anything. That’s one thing you can say about this fucked-up, shitheel town. Tied up tighter than a … well, whatever, you know?”

  “Understood, but I’d prefer to see my gear inside.”

  “You go do whatever you need to do, mister.”

  Henry, still a little puzzled by this girl, carried his knapsack and guitar into the boardinghouse. Alice Honeycutt was fussing around the place.

  “I wondered where you’d gone to,” she said.

  “Just getting my things, Mrs. Honeycutt.”

  “Well, you come on upstairs, and I’ll show you your room.”

  It was a perfectly adequate room, a window overlooking the backyard, a narrow bed, a good deal wider than the bunk he’d used for the previous three years.

  “Don’t know that your neighbors are gonna appreciate that there guitar, Mr. Quinn.”

  Henry smiled. “Oh, I won’t make any noise, Mrs. Honeycutt. You need all sorts of gear to have that make any noise at all. Don’t you worry.”

  “Well, as long as no one’s being disturbed, I’m sure it will be fine.”

  “I wanted to ask about payment,” Henry said.

  Mrs. Honeycutt waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, I don’t deal with any of the business side of this, Mr. Quinn. You’ll need to work that out with Knox. Far as I know, you’re just a guest here tonight, a favor to Sheriff Riggs. My understanding is that you’ll be leaving in the morning anyway.”